Case Dropped Against U.S. Officer in Beating Deaths of Afghan Inmates

The Army has dropped its case against the only officer to face criminal charges in connection with the beating deaths of two prisoners held by the United States in Afghanistan, military officials said yesterday.

The officer, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, led a reservist military police company that was guarding the main American detention center in Afghanistan when the two men were killed within days of each other in December 2002. The prisoners died after guards kneed them repeatedly in the legs while each was shackled to the ceiling of his cell.

Captain Beiring, 39, had been charged with lying to investigators and being derelict in his duties, in part by neglecting after the first death to order his soldiers to stop chaining up prisoners by the arms at the behest of military interrogators who wanted to deprive them of sleep before questioning.

"They certainly had a case to investigate -- two guys died," Captain Beiring said yesterday in an interview. "And, obviously, some soldiers did some stuff wrong and needed to be punished. But I think it got blown out of proportion. At some point, they were just playing politics."

The collapse of the case is the latest and most embarrassing of several setbacks for the team of Army prosecutors that has been working for more than a year on the deaths, which occurred at the military detention center in Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul.

Captain Beiring is the third member of the 377th Military Police Company, based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., to have had charges dismissed before trial. Four enlisted soldiers in the unit have been acquitted, two others pleaded guilty to assault and one was convicted of assault, maiming and other charges.

Four former interrogators from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., have pleaded guilty to charges including assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty.

In Captain Beiring's case, the decision by the commander of the Army's Air Defense Artillery Center at Fort Bliss, Tex., where the Bagram cases are being tried, followed the recommendation of an investigating judge that it not proceed to a court-martial.

A spokeswoman for Fort Bliss, Jean Offutt, said Captain Beiring was issued a letter of reprimand on Friday. Captain Beiring said that the letter contained accusations of dereliction of duty and that he would formally rebut them.

The judge who oversaw the pretrial inquiry, Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, sharply criticized the prosecutors' case, concluding in a 22-page report that they had failed to present sufficient evidence to support any of the charges.

The accusation that Captain Beiring lied about his efforts to train his soldiers after they arrived in Afghanistan was based on "one slightly ambiguous response" in one of the half-dozen sworn statements he gave to various military investigators, Colonel Berg noted. He added that Captain Beiring's response was then "significantly misquoted" by the prosecutors in the charges they filed.

Colonel Berg, the investigating judge, also dismissed two charges of dereliction of duty against Captain Beiring. In those charges, prosecutors had argued that the captain had failed to properly train his soldiers to handle the detainees and to order them to stop chaining prisoners overhead after the first one died.

Though Colonel Berg noted that the company had scarcely been trained for its specific mission at Bagram, he said Captain Beiring had sought and was denied more training before his company deployed. The unit spent barely a day learning from the company it replaced before that unit left Afghanistan.

Colonel Berg said that "substantial evidence" also showed that Captain Beiring did, in fact, instruct his junior and noncommissioned officers to stop the overhead chaining of detainees after two more senior officers insisted that he do so. The fact that a second prisoner died while similarly shackled "only shows that someone else either did not get the word about standing restraints or, more likely, got the word and chose to disregard it."

"Captain Beiring was sorely challenged at every step," Colonel Berg concluded. "He may not have done his duty perfectly, but he did it well."

Ms. Offutt, the Fort Bliss spokeswoman, said charges of abuse and other crimes against another former Bagram interrogator, Pfc. Damien M. Corsetti, would go forward to a general court-martial. One more reservist from Captain Beiring's company, Sgt. Alan J. Driver Jr., is scheduled to be tried next month.